On 31st December I noticed an irritating but interesting book about population and other matters by one Danny Dorling. Irritating in large part because of his breezy but implausible expertise in all kinds of matters well outside the normal field of vision of a geographer, even one who is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography of the School of Geography and the Environment of the University of Oxford. Interesting in large part because of his claim that the the world's population would stabilise at below 10 billion, rather than some much larger number of the sort scouted around by rubbishy professional demographers, and that population was not at all the biggest problem that we face on earth.
So I was interested to see in the Guardian a couple of days ago that one Adrian E. Raftery, both paddy and professional demographer, has led a team which has decided that population will continue to grow steadily throughout the current century to reach 11 billion by the end of it, with the troubled Nigeria growing to humungous proportions. Good job that they have got some oil to help them feed them all.
Being so prompted to look back at Dorling this morning, it is easy to see why he was so irritating first time around. Right know all. And, as lawyers tell us in courtroom dramas on television, nothing so bad on the stand as an expert witness. You can always get one to back whatever story you want and they often seem to go around in circles, sometimes ever decreasing. Never give you a clear, clean answer to anything.
But I was interested to see that the Bayes word is prominent in Raftery's CV, to which I shall come back to in due course. It seems to be a lot more respectable these days than it was where I learned my probability.
And maybe Dorling could get a role as a prof. in a forthcoming episode of 'Lewis'. That apart, I think I shall now leave the question of population growth, or not, aside.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=dorling.
Reference 2: http://www.demographic-research.org/authors/1565.htm.
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Monday, 22 September 2014
Tuesday, 31 December 2013
Interim report
Breaking a long standing custom, I notice a book before finishing, 'Population 10 billion' by one Danny Dorling, hitherto unknown to me. Oddly, for a chap who appears to be quite into (self) publicity - see http://www.dannydorling.org/ - and to be quite a lefty, no less than the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography of the School of Geography and the Environment of the University of Oxford - and these the people who would not make A. J. P. Taylor a prof. because he had been on the box.
The book has a rather irritating style and despite appearing to be organised into 8 straightforward chapters charting the growth of the world's population up to the 10 billion now scheduled for some time around 2100 CE, is in fact a sort of car boot sale of all sorts of stuff which might otherwise be culled over a rather longer period from the pages of the Guardian. Rather like a blog blown up to an unappetising if not unnatural size: perhaps he needed a fiercer editor to inject more discipline and to get the size down from the present 444 or so pages to 333 or so. As it is, I am finding sequential reading difficult and have resorted to dipping - which I would not have thought was the idea. Proper books, for this reader anyway, should tell a coherent story.
All of which is a pity, because the message that I get is both interesting and important: that is to say that the population of the world is not rising exponentially and will probably stabilise at or around 10 billion (up from rather more than 7 now), a level which we can probably cope with if we could only learn how to do something to curb waste & excess and something to make the distribution of food & other goodies a bit fairer than it is now. Or as the great man famously said: 'Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen!'.
As a former demographer of sorts, I was amused at the amount of time & effort Dorling spends on rubbishing UN demographers, who, it seems, were foolish enough to publish projections several hundred years into the future.
He also spends a lot of time & effort on various topics peripheral to the population theme, as I said before, a regular car-boot sale of a book. But apart from finding it hard to read, I am suspicious; a book that skates over so much ground is probably skating on thin ice. The chatty style does not give one confidence that the chap has spent quality time checking all his facts; reliable enough to use in the pub, but I am not sure that they are reliable enough to use in the formulation of policy.
PS 1: while writing the foregoing I became curious about how much a Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography of the School of Geography and the Environment of the University of Oxford might earn, but I failed to find out, beyond establishing that it is probably rather less than £100,000 and a lot less than the £250,000 and more which university vice chancellors award themselves these days. On the other hand, the royalties on books are probably to be added on, with no rules about not making money out of research and writing done while on the public payroll. In any event, some way above the median wage. Maybe even what used to be called a champagne lefty.
PS 2: is he any relation of the now retired Christopher Dorling, the now retired co-founder of DK books, now swallowed up in Pearson? See 3rd November.
The book has a rather irritating style and despite appearing to be organised into 8 straightforward chapters charting the growth of the world's population up to the 10 billion now scheduled for some time around 2100 CE, is in fact a sort of car boot sale of all sorts of stuff which might otherwise be culled over a rather longer period from the pages of the Guardian. Rather like a blog blown up to an unappetising if not unnatural size: perhaps he needed a fiercer editor to inject more discipline and to get the size down from the present 444 or so pages to 333 or so. As it is, I am finding sequential reading difficult and have resorted to dipping - which I would not have thought was the idea. Proper books, for this reader anyway, should tell a coherent story.
All of which is a pity, because the message that I get is both interesting and important: that is to say that the population of the world is not rising exponentially and will probably stabilise at or around 10 billion (up from rather more than 7 now), a level which we can probably cope with if we could only learn how to do something to curb waste & excess and something to make the distribution of food & other goodies a bit fairer than it is now. Or as the great man famously said: 'Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen!'.
As a former demographer of sorts, I was amused at the amount of time & effort Dorling spends on rubbishing UN demographers, who, it seems, were foolish enough to publish projections several hundred years into the future.
He also spends a lot of time & effort on various topics peripheral to the population theme, as I said before, a regular car-boot sale of a book. But apart from finding it hard to read, I am suspicious; a book that skates over so much ground is probably skating on thin ice. The chatty style does not give one confidence that the chap has spent quality time checking all his facts; reliable enough to use in the pub, but I am not sure that they are reliable enough to use in the formulation of policy.
PS 1: while writing the foregoing I became curious about how much a Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography of the School of Geography and the Environment of the University of Oxford might earn, but I failed to find out, beyond establishing that it is probably rather less than £100,000 and a lot less than the £250,000 and more which university vice chancellors award themselves these days. On the other hand, the royalties on books are probably to be added on, with no rules about not making money out of research and writing done while on the public payroll. In any event, some way above the median wage. Maybe even what used to be called a champagne lefty.
PS 2: is he any relation of the now retired Christopher Dorling, the now retired co-founder of DK books, now swallowed up in Pearson? See 3rd November.
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